Waiting for Robots

"Artificial Intelligence fuels both panic and enthusiasm. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they're animated beings, and consider them efficient. Users complain when these technologies don't obey; we worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods; and we yearn for their convenience. We see ourselves reflected in them, and we treat them as something entirely new. However unwillingly, when we overestimate the performance of these tools, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans contribute to their efficiency. In this bracing and powerful book, sociologist and award-winning author Antonio Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how AI continues to exploit human labor, including yours. He connects the diverse activities of today's tech laborers: platform laborers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; remote workers, performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and you, as you evaluate text or images to show you're not a robot, react to Facebook posts, or approve ChatGPT output. Using diverse examples, Casilli reveals that most "automation" still requires human labor, showing both tomorrow's threats and today's consequences for failing to recognize and compensate human workers."--